Ubisoft – Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (Fail) Mouse/Control Problems

I have to plop in my thoughts on a game I’ve been all excited in playing, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier on PC even on a menstrual blog because of how outraged I am. Having tweeted in the past about Ubisoft’s failure with a game called ANNO 2070 where it would require you to have a persistent internet connection to play, their commitment to failure has not ceased. In ANNO 2070, being offline would kill a variety of critical game mechanics and features. Though this is supposed to act a deterrent for those who illegally download the game, it also serves as a huge inconvenience to those who purchase it legally. With that said, those who pirated the game were much better off because it allowed people who didn’t always have a permanent internet connection to play. Point noted is that their aggressive attempts failed miserably… in fact, it solidified many opinions of my friends and I on why we should bother paying a company to release a game in which we didn’t have the “right” to play anytime, anywhere. Doesn’t it make more sense to pay $0 and have MORE rights to the game than those who paid $50?

In the past few days since the release of GR:FS Ubisoft has been “so-called” listening to the feedback of fans about the game and bugs which have cropped up. These “grand production” of games somehow pass QA when basic functionality such as keyboard/mouse fail to operate correctly when playing the game. Some people have mentioned that having any additional controllers plugged in may supersede the keyboard/mouse controls, but having unplugged all my “accessories”, the game continues to act as if I have a XBOX controller plugged in an refuse to allow my mouse to move the directional facing of my character. How did QA/Testers not see this bug? 2 patches which I’m aware of has been released, 1.1 and 1.2… none of which truly addresses the controller issue. I understand that fixing other components of the game is important, however, when your fans can’t even play the game – what does it matter if you’re “improving performance” and “enhancing gameplay”? WHAT GAMEPLAY?

Many sites such as this one recommend people hold off on buying the game, particularly for the European launch happening tomorrow (Friday). Why would you even want to support a company which screws you for your money? They’re making futile attempts to “smooth things out” with many of their customers by offering this game a one-time DRM activation requirement. I have not had any fun with this game at all, why? Because I can’t even play the game unless I’d like to only be staring straight in front of me at all times while getting shot from the side and not being able to retaliate.

Ubisoft is exactly the reason why consumers should be looking to their local pirating sources for the game, rather than paying for a product which you are crippled from using. Shit, the pirates might provider a better fix than the game maker would! Porting a game is bad enough when there are so many remnants of the console configurations lying about, but it’s worse when a game detects things that aren’t there or refuse to accept input from other devices.

I like how a Ubisoft publisher representative has ‘pledged to fix a critical bug which prevents PC users from playing the game’. Did you really need to pledge or promise something like that? This isn’t just a nuisance/bug that can be overlooked, this makes the game UNPLAYABLE. If they didn’t bother addressing it and addressing it damn soon what makes them think that consumers are stupid enough to pay for a non-working product (ok well there will always be a few fan-tards)? Even just by DELAYING a fix like this they’ve probably lost tons of customers who were going to pay for the product instead of downloading it.

Congratulations to all the people who “acquired” the game through alternate sources than paying Ubisoft.

As we all know UBI loves to blame PC game delays on piracy. Clearly it’s not a piracy issue, it’s an incompetence issue. This game is NOT finished

– Forum User

I must point out their lovely “workarounds” as well… oh right, because they’re too incompetent to release a product which works for gamers computers (probably their target market) who usually will have multiple input devices attached. In order to play the game, I will need to:

The game is running with keyboard/mouse OR gamepad. In order to lay with the Keyboard/mouse you should remove all other peripherals (game pads, joysticks, wheels etc).

If you had a controller installed on the PC please try to uninstall the controller drivers.

So…. it’s bad enough I have to go to the back of my computer cabinet to unhook/hook up any other input devices than my keyboard/mouse before and after gameplay, but I even need to uninstall my drivers? Good lord!

Fix your god damn product and because of your incompetence, I really hope most people will avoid buying your shoddy software and just pirate it… just like you deserve. They’ll probably use this as an excuse to go back to DRM… lol!

I hope more people will follow this trend. When I buy something, I want to feel the item which I purchased is of value… in this case, it has been a long time since Ubisoft deserved people buying their products rather than just stealing it.

I expect a reputable and “large” company like this to make higher quality games. There are so many ‘legally free’ games out there that are better than paying multi-miliion companies to build them. Also with such deep resources and vast team of developers, I can’t even fathom the mistakes they have made. If for instance this game was Indie and made by a few folks in their basement, I could perhaps see some possibility of these follies, but not from an international company such as this. Even if they don’t go broke, I hope they look at reorganizing their company or start replacing useless staff with useful ones. This game’s “mistakes” really left my scratching my head. And even after a week now, they still don’t have a patch until the coming week… that’s sad for them to take so long to fix something that – well – shouldn’t have been broken in the first place.

It’s sad to see so many franchises that originally started on PC, move over to the consoles leaving the PC gamers with a semi working product. I buy a lot of games each year, most of which is PC games, but lately only around 1/4 was wourth the price. The rest delivers frustrations at a hafty price tag. … It’s a sad thought, but maybe it’s time to stop preordering games and wait and see…

I think I’ve only ever pre-ordered a game once in my life and exactly for the reasons you pointed out. I don’t like the idea of paying for something I don’t know if I’m going to be satisfied with – especially if there is no means of return. The price tag on a lot of these games are ridiculous and if companies haven’t learned anything already, it’s better to sell a product at a lower price and entice more buyers, than set the price high and have fewer buyers with the rest of them downloading it. The industry keep on blaming downloaders, but maybe they should first look at themselves on how they are DISCOURAGING people from paying for their product. I’m annoyed over this because this is a grand-production game by an internationally-known company, not kids programming in the basement (which truthfully seems like they could do better).

I don’t feel that Ubisoft deserves any of my money and I surely will make friends/family aware of it should they be considering paying for their products. I’m sure we’d feel better we spent $0 for a game that is worth… well $0… and of course the “worth” of a game isn’t exactly defined as what Ubisoft things they want to get from their customers… hah.

Stupid stupid me, why didn´t i learn anything from Silent Hunter 5? Maybe i thought that okay they messed up my favorite game series by releasing an unplayable game. (Sink 100.000 tones of shipping with about 12 torpedoes. 8333 1/3 tons/torpedo. And most ships above that require 2-3 torpedoes and you see them a lot. Blowing a big mother¤¤¤ hole in the bow and shooting another one at the ships propulsion ended up with me being rammed by a ship with the bow underwater, propellers high in the sky and still maneuverable. + No resupply. Resuply ship= none in the vicinity, port= reset tonnage count) But now this wrecks the Tom Clancy series, i´ve played 3 (maybe moore) games of this series on the ps2 and that was splinter cell. In my man hours of gameplay i discovered only one bug/glitch in double agent and that was a ragdoll bug (never been able to replicate) and all of them were straight out of the box with no patches whatsoever. And now i thought that i tried one of the ghost recon series on xbox 360, looked great but me and tactical game on gamepad= no chance. I bought Future soldier to pc for 24,40€ and haven´t even gotten past the first level because my mouse doesn´t work and all the help messages are for the xbox 360 controller. Damn you Ubisoft. If i ever solve this problem it will be without your help and i will never give the fix to you. Down with Ubisoft. Thank god i did the sensible thing and pirated Silent Hunter 5. See your f#cking stupid didn´t work, it did the opposite! HAHA.
Gonna stick with Bohemia Interactive and their Arma series. Full of bug but unique and playable, help from developers and awsesome community. If ubisoft want to learn anything talk with bohemia interactive. They released several games full of bugs but are still liked by the community.

It was certainly fixed in the most recent patch… HOWEVER, a crippling game-bug like this should’ve never happened in the first place. Also, it took them two patches before they even bothered looking into the controller/keyboard issue and that is really disturbing. The customer support as shown on the forums were lackluster and it didn’t make me feel that if I were a paying customer, that I would feel valued.

I did not Pre-order this knowing UBIsoft’s reputation, I burried myself into BF3, and patiently waited. I just got the game June 7th 2013 with all of its DLC’s and the mouse lag problem is still present. They have big balls leaving it unresolved for this long, What are they doing it out of spite ?